Castle of Vice – Development Diary #1 (Alpha 0.2 Preview)

Hello everyone,

This is the first entry in the Castle of Vice development diary, which replaces the behind-the-scenes posts I used to make for Ethereal Sunder. Those posts were only available to Tier 3 members, but I wanted to make development progress available to everyone for future projects, so here we are with a public developer diary.

This first post comes a bit later than planned. I originally wanted to publish it last week, but I decided to delay it so I could finish one more feature and talk about it here. But starting next month, my goal is to post at least one development diary entry per update, usually about a week before the new version goes live.

I’m also considering sharing smaller work-in-progress snippets on X (Twitter), though I’m still figuring out how to write an informative post with the character limits…We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, let’s move on to the reason why you clicked this post and check what’s new in Castle of Vice Alpha 0.2!

. . .

First, this update adds three new exploration events. My long-term goal is to include enough of them that repeats become rare or at least only happen after a long time playing. This is the beginning of that goal, and more events (both normal and erotic) will be added in future updates.

With these new events also comes a new negative trait that lowers Strength. Like the previous Faith negative trait, you can acquire this if you fail certain event checks.

Moving on, we have a new cultist enemy!

This one is a support type, whose role is to keep his allies in the fight.

In addition, some enemy illustrations have been updated with tattoos indicating their rank within the cult.

In the future, I plan for stronger (higher-rank) versions of these enemies to have more tattoos. These tougher variants won’t just have higher stats and health, they’ll also come with additional skills you will have to play around.

The next addition is a new feature requested by some players: displaying a tooltip with the details about the function of each parameter during the level-up window.

You can display these tooltips by clicking on the parameter’s name in yellow text (as mentioned in the first tutorial). Hopefully, this makes understanding the parameters easier.

Next is the addition of a new enemy erotic action during erotic sequences, which consists of the enemy pinching a certain delicate part in the lower body of our protagonist.

Finally, the main reason I delayed this post: safe room conversations with Karidion!

The way it works is simple: when a conversation with Karidion is available, you will see this icon above him.

Clicking it will start the conversation:

And well, though I say “conversations,” right now there is only one available. But I’ll be adding more conversations so that you can learn more about Karidion, Annelise, and the world they live in.

That’s all for the new content!

. . .

Castle of Vice Alpha 0.2 will release this Friday, October 3rd.

Next week, I want to do another of these posts with some thoughts on version 0.3, including a new type of erotic sequence, so please look forward to that.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post, and I hope you have a great start to the week!